Tuesday, June 30, 2009

HackerWatch lets you report and share information that helps identify, combat, and prevent the spread of Internet threats and unwanted network traffic.

Security is becoming increasingly critical as the Internet continues to see a surge in intrusion attempts, phishing, hacking, and worm and virus outbreaks. However, with the assistance of users worldwide, HackerWatch offers a unique kind of Internet reconnaissance: by collecting and analyzing users’ firewall activity, we can identify intrusion attempts, track complex attack patterns, and disclose the sources and targets of Internet threats. The resulting information this provides is lasting in its instructiveness: it helps all of us understand, block, and prevent unwanted Internet traffic and future threats.

An effective way to reinforce security is to expose those elements which threaten it. This is why HackerWatch also provides reports and graphical up-to-date snapshots of unwanted Internet traffic and threats. Snapshots include critical port incidents graphs, worldwide port activity statistics, and target and source maps showing unwanted traffic and potential threats to Internet security.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard has unveiled a prototype of the solar-powered plane he hopes eventually to fly around the world.

The vehicle, spanning 61m but weighing just 1,500kg, will undergo trials to prove it can fly through the night.

Dr Piccard, who made history in 1999 by circling the globe non-stop in a balloon, says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies.

The final version of the plane will try first to cross the Atlantic in 2012.

It will be a risky endeavour. Only now is solar and battery technology becoming mature enough to sustain flight through the night - and then only in unmanned planes.

But Dr Piccard's Solar Impulse team has invested tremendous energy - and no little money - in trying to find what they believe is a breakthrough design.

"I love this type of vision where you set the goal and then you try to find a way to reach it, because this is challenging," he told BBC News.

The HB-SIA has the look of a glider but is on the scale - in terms of its width - of a modern airliner.

The aeroplane incorporates composite materials to keep it extremely light and uses super-efficient solar cells, batteries, motors and propellers to get it through the dark hours.

Dr Piccard will begin testing with short runway flights in which the plane lifts just a few metres into the air.

As confidence in the machine develops, the team will move to a day-night circle. This has never been done before in a piloted solar-powered plane.

HB-SIA should be succeeded by HB-SIB. It is likely to be bigger, and will incorporate a pressurised capsule and better avionics. It is this vehicle which will attempt to circle the Earth (after first making an Atlantic crossing).

It is probable that Dr Piccard will follow a route similar to the one he took in the record-breaking Breitling Orbiter 3 balloon - travelling at a low latitude in the Northern Hemisphere. The flight could go from the United Arab Emirates, to China, to Hawaii, across the southern US, southern Europe, and back to the UAE.

Measuring success

Although the vehicle is expected to be capable of flying non-stop around the globe, Dr Piccard will in fact make five long hops, sharing flying duties with project partner Andre Borschberg.

"The aeroplane could do it theoretically non-stop - but not the pilot," said Dr Piccard.

"We should fly at roughly 25 knots and that would make it between 20 and 25 days to go around the world, which is too much for a pilot who has to steer the plane.

"In a balloon you can sleep, because it stays in the air even if you sleep. We believe the maximum for one pilot is five days."

The public unveiling on Friday of the HB-SIA took place at Dubendorf airfield near Zürich.

"The real success for Solar Impulse would be to have enough millions of people following the project, being enthusiastic about it, and saying 'if they managed to do it around the world with renewable energies and energy savings, then we should be able to do it in our daily life'."

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Gamers have largely gotten a bad rep for being lazy, slothful people who spend their hours mindlessly pressing buttons. The Wii changed that a bit by getting kids (and their parents... and their parents) up off the couch, but what about giving their brains a workout too? For your family's little mind freak to-be Mattel is introducing the Mind Flex, a brain-powered game that relies on your mental activity to control the height of a ball suspended in a column of air. Don the headset then start concentrating to make the purple orb rise; relax and it lowers. There are six total game types but all entail getting a ball over, under, and through a variety of hoops and the like, sometimes against a clock so that you can challenge your friends. Sadly you have to actually reach up and turn the dial to move the ball around the course, but in our heads on trial we found the thing to be impressively responsive, gently sinking down when we thought about getting some sleep -- then shooting back up again when we pondered the number of posts left to write tonight. It was challenging for sure, and definitely turned a lot of heads, but we're a little concerned that extended sessions could be headache inducing. Its $80 price tag might cause some temple pain too when the thing releases this fall, but we've certainly spent more money on things that were less fun -- and mentally stimulating. Video of floaty balls and squinting players below.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon. In the meantime, please leave us your email address and we'll notify you as soon as Google Voice becomes available. To learn more about Google Voice, check out our feature videos.

Flapjax is a new programming language designed around the demands of modern, client-based Web applications. Its principal features include:

Event-driven, reactive evaluation

An event-stream abstraction for communicating with web services

Interfaces to external web services

Flapjax is easy to learn: it is just a JavaScript framework. Furthermore, because Flapjax is built entirely atop JavaScript, it runs on traditional Web browsers without the need for plug-ins or other downloads. It integrates seamlessly with existing JavaScript code and other frameworks.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Today, Microsoft announced Microsoft Hohm. That's Hohm as in H + OHM, the unit of measurement for electrical impedance.

Microsoft Hohm is a free web based application (running on the Windows Azure platform) that enables consumers to better understand their energy usage by utilizing advanced analytics licensed from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy to provide home owners with personalized energy-saving recommendations.

The beta is now available to all residents in the United States with plans to roll out internationally over the next year and beyond.

Troy Batterberry joined me in the studio to walkthrough Microsoft Hohm and explain how the service can help you reduce your energy consumption, lower your carbon footprint and save some real money.

Axum is an incubation project from Microsoft’s Parallel Computing Platform that aims to validate a safe and productive parallel programming model for the .NET framework. It’s a language that builds upon the architecture of the web and the principles of isolation, actors, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity. Other advanced concepts we are exploring are data flow networks, asynchronous methods, and type annotations for taming side-effects. Axum Lite: Contains the Axum command-line compiler and Axum runtime as well as the sample projects. Programmer's Guide: Use this simple and easy to follow programmer's guide to learn how to create safe, scalable, and responsive applications with the Axum language. Language Specification: A detailed specification of the Axum language.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

You may have heard rumors lately about “Morro,” the new no-cost anti-malware solution being launched by Microsoft. Now called “Microsoft Security Essentials,” the program will launch into a limited beta today at www.microsoft.com/security_essentials. The first 75,000 visitors to that site will have the opportunity to download and install the new software for free. (This will be available in English to the U.S. and Israel and in Brazilian Portuguese in Brazil.)

For those wanting to run Microsoft Security Essentials, you’ll need to have either a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows XP SP2 or higher, Windows Vista, or Windows 7. The software will not come pre-installed on the Windows 7 OS so you will still have a choice as to which anti-malware program they want to run. However, it will be made available as a download (but not through Windows Update) for those looking for a free and trustworthy solution which you can run without worrying about registration or renewals. Security Essentials users will also have access to free community and email support.

The security features in the new software include real-time protection, a dynamic signature service, and rootkit protection. If an infection is found, users will be prompted to fix it by pressing an action button which will appear on the screen. The process is designed to be a “one-click fix” so it’s extremely easy for anyone to use.

The program has also been made lightweight so as not to slow down your system as many anti-virus software applications have done in the past. To accomplish this, it implements features like CPU throttling, idle-time scanning, smart caching, and active memory swapping. Those last two make it so that signatures not in use don’t take up space in the available memory, a feature which makes Microsoft Security Essentials ideal for older PCs as well as today’s less powerful netbooks.

A powerful robotic lunar scout, NASA's first in more than a decade, arrived at the moon early Tuesday on a mission to seek out potential landing sites and hidden water ice for future astronauts.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) fired its thrusters at 5:47 a.m. EDT (0947 GMT) in a 40-minute maneuver to begin orbiting the moon. It is NASA's first unmanned moon shot since 1998.

"We are in lunar orbit," said LRO project scientist Richard Vondrak at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're not going past the moon. We're there to stay."

About the size of a Mini Cooper car, the $504 million LRO probe launched toward the moon on June 18 and spent four days in transit - about a day longer than astronauts on the Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The robotic probe is expected to spent at least one year mapping the moon for future manned missions, as well as several more years conducting science surveys.

"LRO has returned NASA to the moon," a flight controller said as NASA's LRO mission control center erupted in applause. The probe's lunar arrival comes just under one month ahead of the 40th anniversary of NASA's first moon landing by Apollo 11 astronauts on July 20, 1969.

The spacecraft carries seven instruments to map the moon in unprecedented detail, seek out water ice hidden in the permanent shadows of craters at the lunar south pole, and measure the temperature and radiation hazards future astronauts may face. The names of 1.6 million people are also riding aboard LRO as part of a public outreach program.

LRO is currently circling the moon in an extremely elliptical orbit that brings the nearly 2-ton probe within about 124 miles (200 km) of the lunar surface at its closest and reaches out to 1,863 miles (3,000 km).

"It went like clockwork," said Craig Tooley, NASA's LRO project manager. "In the end, it went exactly as planned."

Over the next few days, more thruster firings should fine-tine the spacecraft's flight path until it reaches its planned observation orbit of between 31 and 135 miles (50 to 218 km). Two of LRO's seven instruments, a pair of radiation sensors, scanned the space environment between the Earth and the moon, with the remaining five instruments to be activated in the next few weeks.

The first images from the powerful camera aboard LRO should be beamed back to Earth in the next few weeks, mission managers said.

"This whole new moon we're ready to see is out there waiting, and this mission is going to go get it," said Jim Garvin, NASA's chief scientist at Goddard.

A second unmanned spacecraft, the $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS), also launched with LRO and is expected to slingshot past the moon later today at about 8:20 a.m. EDT (1220 GMT). The spacecraft and an attached empty Centaur rocket stage will fly by the moon and shift into a polar orbit that will ultimately end in an Oct. 9 crash into a shadowed crater at the moon's south pole to probe for hidden water ice.

NASA plans to release live video from LCROSS as it flies past the moon at a distance of about 5,592 miles (9,000 km), mission managers have said.

How the next generation war is going to be? Not sure, see following video.

Intelligent machines deployed on battlefields around the world - from mobile grenade launchers to rocket-firing drones - can already identify and lock onto targets without human help.

There are more than 4,000 U.S. military robots on the ground in Iraq, as well as unmanned aircraft that have clocked hundreds of thousands of flight hours.

The first three armed combat robots fitted with large-caliber machine guns deployed to Iraq last summer, manufactured by U.S. arms maker Foster-Miller, proved so successful that 80 more are on order, Sharkey said.

But up to now, a human hand has always been required to push the button or pull the trigger.

If we are not careful, he said, that could change.

Military leaders "are quite clear that they want autonomous robots as soon as possible, because they are more cost-effective and give a risk-free war," he said.

Several countries, led by the U.S., have already invested heavily in robot warriors developed for use on the battlefield.

South Korea and Israel both deploy armed robot border guards, while China, India, Russia and Britain have all increased the use of military robots.

Washington plans to spend $4 billion by 2010 on unmanned technology systems, with total spending expected rise to $24 billion, according to the Pentagon's Unmanned Systems Roadmap 2007-2032, released in December.

James Canton, an expert on technology innovation and CEO of the Institute for Global Futures, predicts that deployment within a decade of detachments that will include 150 soldiers and 2,000 robots.

The use of such devices by terrorists should be a serious concern, Sharkey said.

Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse-engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon of choice.

"I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.

But even more worrisome, he said, is the subtle progression from the semiautonomous military robots deployed today to fully independent killing machines.

"I have worked in artificial intelligence for decades, and the idea of a robot making decisions about human termination terrifies me," Sharkey said.

Ronald Arkin of Georgia Institute of Technology, who has worked closely with the U.S. military on robotics, agrees that the shift toward autonomy will be gradual.

But he is not convinced that robots don't have a place on the front line.

"Robotics systems may have the potential to outperform humans from a perspective of the laws of war and the rules of engagement," he told a conference on technology in warfare at Stanford University last month.

The sensors of intelligent machines, he argued, may ultimately be better equipped to understand an environment and to process information.

"And there are no emotions that can cloud judgment, such as anger," he added.

Nor is there any inherent right to self-defense.

For now, however, there remain several barriers to the creation and deployment of Terminator-like killing machines.

Some are technical. Teaching a computer-driven machine - even an intelligent one - how to distinguish between civilians and combatants, or how to gauge a proportional response as mandated by the Geneva Conventions, is simply beyond the reach of artificial intelligence today.

But even if technical barriers are overcome, the prospect of armies increasingly dependent on remote-controlled or autonomous robots raises a host of ethical issues that have barely been addressed.

Arkin points out that the U.S. Defense Department's $230 billion Future Combat Systems program - the largest military contract in U.S. history - provides for three classes of aerial and three land-based robotics systems.

"But nowhere is there any consideration of the ethical implications of the weaponization of these systems," he said.

For Sharkey, the best solution may be an outright ban on autonomous weapons systems.

"We have to say where we want to draw the line and what we want to do - and then get an international agreement," he said.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

The Draganflyer X6 is a remotely operated, unmanned, miniature helicopter designed to carry wireless video cameras and still cameras. Operate the Draganflyer X6 helicopter with the easy to use handheld controller while viewing what the helicopter sees through video glasses. The Draganflyer X6 helicopter uses a unique 6-rotor design refined from an original concept that has been under development since early 2006. Draganflyer X6 Tech Specs

What can it do for you?

Use the high definition motion video provided by the Draganflyer X6 helicopter for security, reconnaissance, inspection, damage assessment, research, real estate promotion, or advertising. It can be used for

Easy to Fly

The Draganflyer X6 helicopter uses 11 sensors and thousands of lines of code to self-stabilize during flight. This means the Draganflyer X6 is easier to fly than any other helicopter in its class. The Draganflyer X6 on-board software is the result of extensive testing and development since early 2006. Draganflyer X6 Flight Stability

Affordable

The Draganflyer X

6 provides many of the same benefits of larger surveillance aircraft at a fraction of the cost. Obtain aerial photography without the cost of having to rent a plane each time! Request a Quote

UAV Tactical Use

The Draganflyer X6 helicopter is a revolutionary reconnaissance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV); it can be transported in a 5.5" diameter tube slung over the users back while always being ready to launch immediately. Fly it over hills to get a safe view of what is on the other side. Draganflyer X6 Military Applications

See more details at ... http://www.draganfly.com/uav-helicopter/draganflyer-x6

Sunday, June 14, 2009

A Rover project with Live streaming from on board camera and controlled from Tahoe-II board. Commands can be sent from Tahoe-II board (hosting a .net application) to I-BOX Microcontroller using XBEE and same medium is used for I-BOX to stream video from onboard camera to Tahoe-II built-in LCD module.

Rover will be equiped with onboard...

1. Infrared distnace sensor

2. Two surfacce color detector

3. Touch sensor

4. VGA Camera

5. X-BEE Module

6. Light detector

Host applicaiton to control and monitor the mission is developed using...

1. VS.Net 2008

2. .Net Microframework 3.0

Tahoe-II is connected via USB to deploy application on to the board. Board has touch screen which make application very intteractive. Latter it can communicate wirlessly with controlle using X-Bee.

The AD-150 is a high-speed VTOL unmanned aerial vehicle that is being developed by American Dynamics Flight Systems as a future competitor for the United States Marine Corps' Tier III VUAS program as well as other current and future United States VTOL UAV programs.

The AD-150 program began in response to continued interest in maritime capable VTOL UAVs by the United States Department of Defense.

The AD-150 utilizes two wing-tip mounted High Torque Aerial Lift (HTAL) lift and propulsion systems to provide the thrust needed to sustain and transition between hover and forward flight. The two HTAL systems are driven by a single Pratt & Whitney Canada PW200 Turboshaft engine.

The vehicle's propulsion configuration is similar to the Doak VZ-4 in that the 2 propulsion systems are able to tilt from vertical to horizontal mode in order to achieve high-speed forward flight. Unlike the Doak VZ-4, however, the propulsion systems in the AD-150 are also able to pivot longitudinally.

A full-scale model of the AD-150 was displayed for the first time at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International's (AUVSI) Unmanned Systems North America exhibition in Washington D.C. on August 7, 2007.

Thursday, June 4, 2009

BuckyBalls Magnetic Building Spheres are really that cool. You can build basic shapes, complex sculptures, magnetic jewelry, or even outfit your refrigerator in bold and unique ways. Just look at all the shapes and forms you can make with these bad boys - it's amazing! BuckyBalls Magnetic Building Spheres are just what you need to help you brave the boredom of the office. And really, when else will you get to play with your BuckyBalls at work and not get in trouble?

BuckyBalls In Action

BuckyBalls Magnetic Building Spheres

Super powerful, rare earth, magnetic balls - for you to play with.Make sculptures, puzzles, patterns, shapes, jewelry . . . the joy is endless.Each set contains 216 BuckyBalls.Ages: Not for kids or adults under 12 years of age.Dimensions: each Buckyball is approx. 0.125" in diameter.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

At the E3 Expo, Microsoft unveiled something called “Project Natal” which is a whole new way to interact with your Xbox 360. Like Nintendo’s Wii, Natal lets you control a game using motion, but unlike the Wii – very unlike it, in fact – you don’t hold any sort of controllers or sensors in order to do so.Instead, the bar that sits above or below your TV has a camera, sensors, and a microphone within its casing. In other words, it can see you and your movements. It even does facial and voice recognition and lets you swipe through screens by moving your hands (how “Minority Report” is that!)Although Project Natal has no official name, pricing, or release date yet, development kits are being sent out to partners now.

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A Big Thanks to Microsoft for MCC Award!

Mubi is M.Sc. CS & Hehalth Informatics, Certified PMP, Prince 2 RP, IPMA-Level D (Project Manager).
Mubshir has worked since 1999 as a software engineer, advancing to senior systems analyst and project manager. He has extensive software development experience gained across several important platforms, including Professional Membership Management, Healthcare HR Management, HomeCare Management, Fleet Management, Billing and Computer Aided Dispatch. His work involves on going system requirements analysis, development and testing and support services on a fully MS Service oriented based architecture constructed in C# and SQL Server. Mubi has also worked on several international implementations, including in Belgium and UK as well as various clients in public and private healthcare in Ireland.
Mubi qualified with a Masters in Computer Science and also achieved MCP and MCAD certifications form Microsoft. He is a Prince 2 Registered Practitioner and has also recently qualified as a IPMA(Level D). Mubi also received Microsoft Community Contributor award 2011.